Swedish Private Equity Firm Acquires IT Automator UC4

Swedish private equity firm EQT VI revealed Aug. 13 that it has acquired Vienna-based IT process automation software maker UC4 from The Carlyle Group for $271.73 million (220 million euros).
Carlyle's Europe Technology Partners group bought UC4 in March 2006.

Automation is the most desired function in IT right now. With an ever-multiplying pile of data pouring into the world's data containers, IT managers need all the help they can get to maintain control over it all.

UC4's ONE Automation package unifies workload, application release, application process, run-book, data transfer and virtual machine automation. It is aimed at enterprises encountering increasingly complex management of applications and infrastructure. It also is designed for companies migrating to next-generation service models for cloud systems, development operations and big data workloads.
UC4, whose U.S. headquarters is in Bellevue, Wash., launched ONE Automation last year.
ONE Automation also features predictive analytics based on complex event processing. Unified process automation helps IT operations to gain greater control and significantly improve both service delivery and cost savings.

UC4's operating system, Automation Platform v.9, supports most databases, applications and operating systems and provides an alternative to other end-to-end data center automation packages provided by general systems vendors, CEO Jason Liu told eWEEK.
The UC4 Automation Platform now ships standard with purpose-built components for key areas of enterprise automation, such as job scheduling, application process automation, run book, virtualization management, managed file transfer and application release automation, Liu said.
UC4, founded in 2003, has more than 2,000 customers and generated revenue of about 62 million euros ($76.58 million) in the year ended April 2012.

Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz